Intoning Our Independence

Nearly six years ago, in the terrible summer of 2020, I published an article titled “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” In the first paragraph, I wrote that my family and I had “sat around the festive table” a few days before, on the Fourth of July, and “read the Declaration [of Independence] aloud in celebration.” Hardly the most controversial of my words, they nonetheless inspired various people to ridicule me on social media.

Why did my family do what it did? There were, I think, two reasons. First, we wished to celebrate our country. Say what you will about the past and present failures of the United States, but there’s a reason it is widely considered a highly desirable place—for many, by far the most desirable place in the world—to live, work, and raise a family. And second, we wished to celebrate our family, not least because my now-wife and I were newly engaged. Together with her parents, we had begun planning our wedding the following summer, to take place just a mile as the crow flies from where the Battle of Princeton was fought almost half a year to the day after July 4, 1776.

Much has happened since 2020: to the country, of course, but also to me. I now live and work in a politically unpredictable part of the nation’s capital rather than a limousine-progressive university town. As we approach the semiquincentennial, it is hardly surprising that my attention has turned ever more to the Declaration of Independence, about which I published a pair of essays earlier this year, one of them in these pages. And reflecting on my own little declaration, I find that there are more reasons to read America’s founding documents aloud than the two that were on my mind then.

To be clear, the first two reasons remain and, indeed, seem even more important today than they did in 2020. For one thing, it is customary to celebrate big birthdays, and America’s 250th certainly is a big one. I hope that many will use this joy as an antidote to the anti-American fever that has gripped so many of our fellow citizens, especially since the degradations of that terrible summer. And for another, our family has grown. My wife and I now have a daughter, in whom we are trying to instill a number of virtues with which reading the Declaration can help: a knowledge of history, an appreciation for words, and a sense of thoughtful patriotism.

But there are other reasons, too. Intimately connected to the original two, they are the result of my increased appreciation of the importance of an informed citizenry and the benefits, for adults and children alike, of reading aloud. They have to do with both content and form—and, especially, with the combination of the two, something the Declaration manages so elegantly.

We must never forget that education begins at home, around the dinner table.

First, the practice of reading aloud is how Thomas Jefferson intended for the Declaration to be read and how the majority of Americans in those early years would have encountered its words. The intellectual rewards of oral reading are many, and I have written elsewhere about my fierce belief in it. Study after study has shown substantially improved retention for the person mouthing the words (the so-called production effect), and it should go without saying that whenever one does something in a new way—for example, read out loud rather than silently—new features reveal themselves. I don’t know that I would have noticed and then written about the fact that the third use of the conjunction “that” in the famous second sentence of the Declaration is different from the first two had I not stumbled while intoning it.

Reading out well-crafted sentences, paragraphs, and stories to and with young children has the obvious virtue of giving them at an impressionable age an appreciation for the beauty of language different from the appreciation they get from reading words on the page (or, God help us, the screen) or writing with a pen (or, if it must be, on a computer).

Reading aloud also strengthens families. As Rachel Lu puts it in an article about reading to her children at bedtime, “You build a family culture through the things you do together.” Some of my happiest memories of being at home with my parents include reciting poetry over dinner and going around the table reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and A Christmas Carol whenever ’twas the season—and, in preparation for my first trip abroad when I was nine, large parts of another work of Dickens, A Child’s History of England. 

Then there’s the matter of an informed citizenry. Americans’ level of cultural illiteracy is alarming, but there’s a difference between not knowing Dylan Thomas (unfortunate) and not knowing Thomas Jefferson (unacceptable). It was Jefferson who famously wrote to Charles Yancey in 1816 that “if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.” You may think that because you have read the Declaration, your fellow citizens, including your children, have done so as well. Do not be so sure: in 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress judged only 13 percent of eighth graders to be “NAEP Proficient” in US history and only 22 percent in civics.

Middle-school students grow up to be high-schoolers, who often go on to college and in any case to adulthood. But civic literacy does not get better. According to an “America at 250” survey my American Enterprise Institute colleagues Karlyn Bowman and Nicole Penn released in mid-June, 26 percent of the 5,306 adults surveyed had never read the Declaration at all, with another 45 percent reporting that they had read it “in part.” (Keep in mind that the Declaration is short: the length of the present piece.)

As it happens, Jefferson’s words to Yancey are the epigraph of A Broadside for the Nation: Preparing College Students for Informed Citizenship, promulgated in April by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (where I am Scholar-in-Residence). Detailing the crisis in civic education, the broadside calls for every college student to “complete a semester-long course on the American story” that incorporates such essential primary texts as the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. At the moment, under 20 percent of liberal arts institutions require a course on American history or government, which no doubt helps explain why (as ACTA has noted elsewhere) a majority of college students do not know the length of senatorial terms and believe that 1776 was the year the Constitution was written.

We may hope that the notable rise in pre-college classical education and the appearance of civics centers at universities around the country will go some way toward solving the problem. Even so, however, we must never forget that education begins at home, around the dinner table.

In the penultimate paragraph of her 2014 book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, Danielle Allen writes

all adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school. Doing this would help our own powers of reading; it would help our children with their reading. It would strengthen our writing and theirs. It would nourish everyone’s capacity for moral reflection. It would prepare us all for citizenship.

This is spot on. I will add only that, in my view, students should be guided through the Declaration already in middle school and that people of all ages should make a point of reading it, and having it read to them, aloud.

This piece was originally published by Law & Liberty on July 1, 2026.